There were 43 accidents, non-fatal or fatal, in Danbury. The five towns with the most crashes were: Danbury (43); Meriden (21); Oxford (21); Bridgeport (21); andEllington (18). All of those towns have airports.

Groton had the most fatal crashes, with seven, followed by: Danbury (six); Bridgeport (four); Oxford (three); and East Haddam (three).

Few ‘minor’ crashes

While most crashes were not fatal, few were considered “minor.”

In 333 accidents damage to the aircraft was listed as “substantial,” and in 104 accidents the planes were considered “destroyed.” Damage was considered “minor” in just 11 accidents.

Weather conditions

The data indicate whether poor visibility forced pilots to rely more on instruments. In most accidents (393), that wasn’t the case; in 56 accidents, visibility was limited. (In two records, visibility information was unavailable).

About the data

Trend CT did note that the number of plane crashes per year went down over time, but we lacked data on flight hours flown in each year for both commercial and general aviation flights, so we weren’t able to determine how that trend held up. The NTSB data is available here and our analaysis is available in our data repository on GitHub.

Jake is a former managing editor of The Ridgefield Press, a Hersam Acorn newspaper. He worked for the community newspaper chain as a reporter and editor for five years before joining the Mirror staff. He studied professional writing at Western Connecticut State University and is a graduate student in software engineering at Harvard Extension School.